When Dreams Came True

When Dreams Came True by Jack Zipes

For centuries fairy tales have been a powerful mode of passing cultural values onto our children, and for many these stories delight and haunt us from cradle to grave. But how have these stories become so powerful and why? In When Dreams Came True, Jack Zipes explains the social life of the fairy tale, from the sixteenth century on into the twenty-first. Whether exploring Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or The Thousand and One Nights, The Happy Prince or Pinocchio, L. Frank Baum or Hermann Hesse, Zipes shows how the authors of our beloved fairy tales used the genre to articulate personal desires, political views, and aesthetic preferences within particular social contexts. Above all, he demonstrates the role that the fairy tale has assumed in the civilizing process—the way it imparts values, norms, and aesthetic taste to children and adults. This second edition of one of Jack Zipes’s best-loved books includes a new preface and two new chapters on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

"A fascinating social history of the uses and abuses to which fairy tales have been put in the course of their transformation from tales told orally by adults to adults into written (and frequently homogenized) bedtime stories parents read to the childrenZipes persuasively argues that fairy tales keep alive our ‘longing for a better world that can be created out of our dreams and actions’."—New York Times Book Review

"Zipes has forged a career out of brilliant and subversive analyses of fairy tales...Intelligent and thoughtful fun, without deconstructing the land of Faerie into dust and ashes."—Booklist

Jack Zipes is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. An acclaimed translator and scholar of children's literature, his most recent books include Why Fairy Tales Stick, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller, Beautiful Angiola, and The Robber with the Witch's Head, all published by Routledge.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780415980074
ISBN 10	0415980070
Title	When Dreams Came True
Author	Jack Zipes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Taylor & Francis Ltd
Year published	2007-04-16
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable